Volume 49, Number 7 · April 25, 2002
The Star of The Hague
By Tim Judah
In mid-February, during the opening days of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, I spent a week in Belgrade talking about him to friends and experts, politicians and victims. I asked them about their reactions to his trial and what effect they thought it was having on their country. My notebook slowly filled up with dozens of contradictory and confusing views, most of them, it must be said, critical of the trial in one way or another. When I went to get a haircut, Branko, the barber, summed it all up in the space of five minutes. As the scissors skimmed around my left ear he said, 'Milosevic is innocent.' As he moved up to the top of my head he declared, 'Milosevic is guilty, but then so were Izetbegovic and Tudjman.'[1] When he reached my right ear he said, 'Under Milosevic things were great. Now the government will privatize our shop and then we'll lose our jobs.' By the time Branko had got to just above the nape of my neck, though, doubts began to set in. He stood up straight and with a sharp jerk of the scissors declared, 'Fuck Milosevic!'
Feature, 3985 words
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